Thursday, 13 August 2015

MY BLOGGING BOOK

I'm going to start this blog post by stating two things. I am a stationary junkie. I'm also an organisation freak. So when it comes to my blog I like to have things in a book all nicely planned out so I know where I'm at. There are some stunning blog planners out there, and I also do own a filoxfax however the former often work out too expensive for my student budget and the latter is kept for personal thaangs only. Instead I opt for a cheap book from WHSmith which I've made into my perfect blogging book. I started out by designing the front cover (heavily inspired by pinterest) and then went from there. The pictures are all just found either from Pinterest or We Heart It, both of which I love for finding pretty looking images. After putting some sticky back plastic over the whole thing to keep it in place I moved on to working on the inside.

The first thing you'll come across in my blogging book is a years worth of blank calendars. I always like to have a visual timetable of the posts I'm putting up, which are colour coded according to their category; whether the post is a beauty post, lifestyle, part of a series or occasionally a fashion post. I like to spread out the different categories of posts to give my blog some variation, so planning them out like this gives me a great idea of just that. It's also really handy if I want to find out when I put up a post as I know I have all my months in one place. As my book is a handmade thing I simply folded over a pageant decorated it with a rainbow pattern to act as dividers between the sections.

In the main section I've set up a system to organise my process of creating a blog post. A hand created grid means I have space to write the name of the post followed by four tick box spaces to keep track of when I've taken the photo/s for the post (P), edited the photos I've taken (E), written the actually body of the post (W) and scheduled it to be uploaded (S). As I like to bulk take photos this system is great for me to see where I'm up to with each post and lets me know which bits I have left to do. The rest of the pages in my book are generally for whatever, I have some pages with all my blog sizes and numbers on, my social media handles all written down and lists of products for individual posts. Sometimes if I'm editing on a train or in the car and I don't have a product to hand it's useful to know what its name is my looking in my blogging book. I'm super happy with how this book has turned out and it's been a godsend in helping me organise and keep on top of my blog.